Wolfgang Schwarz

Logic 2: Modal Logic (Autumn 2019)

This is a follow-on course to Logic 1, focusing on modal extensions of
classical propositional and predicate logic. Modal logic is used to reason about
possibility and necessity, knowledge and belief, permission and obligation, past
and future, and a variety of other topics. The first part of the course will
introduce standard models and proofs for propositional modal logic, with a brief
look at the meta-logical properties of soundness and completeness. We will then
go through a range of philosophical applications, studying the logic of
knowledge, the logic of obligation, the logic of time, and logical properties of
"if-then" constructions. Finally, we will turn to quantified modal logic. We
will look at the choices between constant and variable domains, rigid and
non-rigid names, and discuss whether standard predicate logic should be weakened
to a "free" logic.